Day-to-day business operations of an organization generate a large amount of information. Organization stores this information on a number of different systems, which may be deployed on disparate platforms. Further, these systems may use different protocols, data structures, and databases, each system customized to cater to a specific business process within the organization. For example, a customer relationship management (CRM) system may include information unique to a customer domain, while another system, including an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, could store sales, and inventory related information.
Organizations employ various enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions to share data across different systems. EAI solutions enable the organization to maintain a comprehensive view of the information, relating to a number of operations and resources, stored in different systems. A considerable amount of time and complexity, however, is involved in implementing EAI solutions due to system, and data-level incompatibilities. Heterogeneity among the data in the different systems must be resolved in order to carry out enterprise-wide integration operations. Moreover, different data sources must employ their own implementations to shield the data to provide their users with an appearance of a single integrated data source.
To that end, organizations often employ one or more data warehouses to integrate enterprise data using extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. In the absence of a real-time connection or interaction between the EAI and data warehousing processes, however, remote monitoring or scheduling of data integration (DI) jobs from different enterprise applications is quite difficult. Thus, most organizations retain two disjointed infrastructures that cannot leverage each other in real-time.
Some current techniques enable interaction between enterprise applications and DI jobs by exposing a remote monitoring or scheduling application as a service consumed by the enterprise applications. An example of such a system is—WEBSPHERE™ Datastage, produced and offered by IBM Corporation as a part of the IBM Information Server. A component of that system, known as the WEBSPHERE™ Information Server Director (WISD), employs service-oriented architecture (SOA) to expose DI jobs as a service consumed by other external applications. This service may be deployed on any application server or may be called by other enterprise applications having Web Services clients, which may request the WISD component for remotely scheduling a DI job.
Exposing DI jobs as a web service for remote monitoring and scheduling, however, can be a complex procedure requiring considerable enterprise resources, and expert user intervention. Further, implementing web services from applications employing lightweight user interfaces, such as email, instant messaging clients, mobile application clients, or other applications that do not provide efficient support to web services, requires specific technical insights. Further, in the absence of tight coupling between the different systems, upgraded jobs necessitate changes in implementation of the web service for updating input and output stages. The user, thus, requires both technical expertise and awareness of various business processes for managing these SOA services efficiently.